In recent times, the national business society has experienced large-scale cyber attacks, causing large financial losses.
In June 2019, the company affected by a cyber attack was Sonangol, the largest national company, where it was completely “paralyzed” and “disoriented” for two days, with hackers having access to privileged information. According to what was revealed by the press, one of the main reasons that allowed the Angolan multinational to be attacked was because they had their antivirus outdated for more than a year, since they did not pay for the license for it, valued at US$200.
Two years later, the Angolan company that made the headlines was Banco de Poupança e Crédito (BPC), which, through a press release, informed society that the technological platform supporting its activities had suffered a cyber attack of unknown origin and causes. .
“The bank followed the security protocols provided to protect the integrity of its customers' financial assets and initiated a rigorous investigation into the occurrence.“, revealed the financial institution in the official note.
According to what was revealed, the cyber attack affected certain servers of the company, where it was temporarily limited to some of its services provided in the branches of the bank's commercial network. To counter this attack, customers were required to regularly use BPC's services, through the Multicaixa network.
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At the end of the same year, that is, in December 2021, the affected institution was the Consulate General of Angola in Lisbon, where its database was completely damaged due to a computer attack.
"It was an external attack and organized by hackers", said an employee of the Consulate's IT sector, although an investigation by the Angolan weekly newspaper Novo Jornal showed that there were strong indications that it was an internal action, with the aim of erasing documents and data that would compromise the previous management of the consulate led for five years. years by Ambassador Narciso do Espírito Júnior, since the current Consul General, Vicência de Brito. She showed interest in terminating the contract with the company providing computer services.
For several specialists in the sector, the computer attack was a clear and perfect burning of files, where several essential services of the consulate were affected for more than a month. Ballots, birth certificate, power of attorney, marriage process, safe-conduct, invoices and payment records, vouchers and other accounting records were some of the many documents that were completely erased from the database system.
“This attack was very well targeted, it was deliberate, because the new consul general wants to terminate the contract with this company providing IT services. Erase everything to leave no traces. The big question now will be how they will prove it was an external attack and not intentional data destruction. And no backups. All this leads to several ongoing internal investigations. It was important to get a final report on this attack,” revealed a source to the national weekly.
More recently, the Angolan company that suffered a major computer attack was NCR, which conditioned its billings for several days and where hackers demanded a financial rescue from the company.
For António Pinto, adviser to the Directorate-General of NCR Angola, said that it was a ransomware-type attack, through which hackers improperly access the institution's data, encrypting and blocking the information found, to later demand a counterpart for your unlock.
The virus used to block NCR's access to the company's data was created in May of this year, where its objective was to block the operating system of machines, namely the virtualization infrastructure of the machines.
